


Moments Mist

by HissHex



Series: Trust Fall [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: A couple mentions of the Regency gang, Baby Peter gets Seen by Jonah and its not a great experience, Gen, I am back on my Uncle Simon agenda, cos of the Lukas's special brand of childraising, mentioned child abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:07:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28406013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HissHex/pseuds/HissHex
Summary: An AU of Trust FallSimon has had enough of the Lukas's and their bullshit and he is taking this tiny child with him.
Series: Trust Fall [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2080383
Comments: 18
Kudos: 34





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have had my month of rest after NaNo, time for writing again!  
> best way to start off the New Year is with my favourite thing to write about, Peter & Simon

Simon looked down at the child walking next to him. A feigned disinterest clouding the boy’s face but a bright flare of curiosity passed it whenever Simon talked about his ships. The Forsaken would snuff that curiosity soon enough even if he stayed in touch with the kid. 

He looked up at the foggy manor that loomed in the distance and then back at Peter. 

This was a **mistake**.

Ok, he had recognised that what he was about to do was a mistake but did that make him want to change his mind?

He couldn’t afford to alienate one of his few allies especially when they were working so closely together on the Daedelus. He should take Peter back to Moorland House, leave the kid there and hope he grows up to have more of a personality than Nathaniel. 

He should do that. 

It’s not like he  _ cared _ .

All the warning Peter got was the brief touch of an arm around his waist before the grounds of Moorland house vanished and he was surrounded by blue sky. 

The thing about the Lonely is that it makes you so very numb in time, so it didn’t immediately occur to him that this was something to be afraid of. Just endless, eternal,  _ lonely,  _ blue sky all around him. 

Which is when he realised that if he was falling that it was going to hurt quite a bit when he hit the ground. 

He screamed.

Simon smiled affably at Nathaniel after dropping Peter off in his domain, it would keep him busy and out of sight of the Lukas’s and hopefully Magnus as well if he was lucky. The man was droning on about business in a deathly monotone and it made Simon dearly miss Mordechai, the man was Forsaken and an absolute bastard for sure, but at least he was fun. Moorland House was quiet, no footsteps of creaks and groans you would expect of such an old building. No dust to show footprints or creaky hinges to indicate people moving from room to room. Nothing to tell you that anyone was there at all. 

Simon remembered when it was first built, an impressive building at the time, bright and beautiful before the fog rolled in and never left. He remembered getting drunk in the parlour and laughing as Magnus tried to be sneaky about getting stories from him and Raynor. He zoned back in as Nathaniel finished talking and handed over the papers to sign, Simon flicked through them but signed hurridly and practically threw himself out the window in his rush to leave this mausoleum of a home. 

Peter had run out of air to scream, he wasn’t sure how long he had been in this endless hell when a familiar arm looped back around him and tugged him back into the real world, though he didn’t recognise where he was. The old man he had met today was brushing himself off as he moved to grab a drink from the kitchen they appeared to be in.

The house Mr Fairchild had apparently taken him to was large, similar to Moorland House. They could not have been more different though, where Moorland was cold and dark, with windows sealed shut and the peering eyes of his ancestors constantly watching over him, judging him, this place was open and bright, everything painted in light colours and art (especially of landscapes he noticed) covering the walls. The large windows showed open sky and mountain tops, they must have been high up, Peter thought as he wiped tears from his cheeks. 

A clink of glass against marble as a glass of orange juice was placed in front of him. Mr Fairchild was sat across him with a glass of something that  _ might _ be fruit juice. Peter didn’t think adults drank fruit juice but he had also never seen his parents drink anything as brightly coloured as what Mr Fairchild was drinking. 

The sat and drunk in silence, Simon peering over at Peter, deep in thought. 

By the time Simon reached the bottom of his cocktail he realised he had no idea what he was doing.


	2. Chapter 2

The thing about Simon, a “flaw” that he was very aware of, was that he got bored  _ very _ quickly.

It was a flaw that Magnus loved to mock him for, loved to tell him that he needed to learn a little patience, but the day Simon chose to listen to the advice of Jonah Magnus would be the day he died. So while taking Peter was an unusually charitable impulse, one that had dragged itself out of what remained of his withered morality, now that the boy was sitting in his home he had no idea what to do next and he could already feel the tug of his interest leading him somewhere else. 

His Patron called him to action, to fun and new experiences the greatest heights and the lowest depths, and looking after a child was not particularly conducive to that. At least not at Peter’s age. 

Simon hadn’t been tied down to anything in 500 years, not people, nor place, nor even his own name. Gravity nor Time had any hold over him, was he really willing to tie himself down to a single child, a boy he barely knew just out of some kind of crumb of righteousness and the memories of a man long since lost to the fog of his own Patron? 

The slowly growing fog outside of the windows told him that the Lukas’ were already aware of his little theft. He had never regretted anything he had ever done and he wasn’t going to start now and he certainly wasn’t going to give the boy back. He could give the boy to one of the other Fairchilds, but they were just as likely to grow bored as him and they didn’t even have any sort of affection for the kid. 

Simon walked over to the phone in the wall, pulling the plug out of the wall and silencing the incessant rings from a no doubt increasingly angry Nathanial. He hadn’t considered the exact long term consequences of his actions, long term wasn’t exactly his thing, but it did suddenly occur to him that there was no legal way he was going to be able to keep this kid. The Lukas’ weren’t going to let him adopt Peter, they wanted to keep him. They didn’t exactly care about each other but he knew that Peter was one of only two Lukas’ of his generation to be Lonely inclined.

He watched as Peter swung his legs gently from the chair he was sat in, looking around in interest at the house and tapping quietly at the table now that he had put down his glass. He was a small little thing, though if the past 2 centuries of Simon’s friendship with the Lukas’ told him anything, he wouldn’t stay this short for long. He wondered if he would see anything of his old friend in the boy once he grew up. Nathaniel may be the head of the Lukas Family, but he had inherited little of the family’s traditional build. Peter showed more promise already, though he supposed if he kept the boy from the Forsaken, Peter probably wouldn’t lose a lot of his colour to the usual paleness of his family. 

That is, if Simon wasn’t too late. 

He could already see the fog behind Peter’s eyes and he had noticed how little noise the boy made. He could try and course correct, steer the boy towards the Vast, but it would take time and Simon couldn’t guarantee he would still care in the amount of time that would take. If he could only burn the fog of the Lonely out now and then he could introduce the boy to his Patron much sooner. He could even take the boy on his next sea voyage if he had some way of doing that. The boy would suit the Vast, he thought, but it was going to take some work to get him there. 

  
  


His phone rang again. 

He ignored it again.

He felt the unignorable sensation of being watched just before the phone rang once more. 

That'll be Magnus   
  
Oh.

Well that would work. 

He picked up the phone.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ha! bet you werent expecting 2 chapters

Peter clutched at Simon like his life depended on it as they dropped though the blue endlessness of the man’s Domain. He was sure he had only blinked for a second before they were suddenly at the steps of an old building, a stained glass owl watching over the entrance. Peter felt very small as they walked through the endless cold halls that sort of reminded him of home if it weren't for how many people crowded the place. Adults rushed from room to room, talking and laughing, stacks of paper or books in their arms. Simon had told him not to let go of his hand, as so not to lose Peter amongst the Institute's workers. As they walked, the number of people grew fewer and fewer until they reached a brass plated door with the inscription of its owner’s name. 

James Wright  
Head of the Magnus Institute

Peter had heard Mr Wright before, talking to his uncle Nathanial in his office, but had never actually met the man. He knew of Mr Magnus and his Institute, from diaries he wasn’t supposed to read in the library and portraits and paintings in the attic that he wasn’t supposed to explore. 

A voice called for them to enter before Mr Simon could even knock on the door. Peter dug his fingers into the bright blue of Mr Simon’s jacket as they walked into the office. Mr Wright was tall, well taller than Mr Simon, his grey eyes boring into the both of them with a wry smirk. 

“Oh Simon, what have you done?” 

Simon rolled his eyes as James poked fun at him. 

“Don’t lecture me James. Are you going to help?”

“And upset the main funding for my Institute? I am not some kind of idiot Simon.”

“Oh come on, you have more sway over the Lukas’ than even they know. They throw away most of their children anyway, what does one more really make? They’ll have forgotten he even exists within a year or so. I just need you to pull a few strings to mess with the paperwork.”

“Oh, is that really all? I thought you wanted something else?”

“I’m surprised you consider getting to See someone as something that would require a favour”, Simon was already preparing to write a considerably larger check than usual in his next meeting with James. 

“That isn’t going to be easy on him you know? If he’s stubborn he might not even survive it.”

“He’s an 8 year old, how willful can he be?”

It turns out that despite the Forsaken blunting his emotions and dulling his personality, Peter was a surprisingly stubborn child. James was almost amused by the child's attempts to drag the few wisps of the Lonely that followed him together to hide himself from his Sight. But at the end of the day, Peter was just a child, a child that had not yet been embraced by his Patron and so had no hopes of even beginning to fend off what would be an attack in any other circumstance. Simon’s arms wrapped around Peter’s middle and muttered hushed half-remembered comforts from his own childhood as he kept the child in place. 

By the time it was done, Peter was sobbing into Simon’s jacket and James was already sitting back at his desk, speaking to some mid-level governmental bureaucrat, no doubt to meddle with some paperwork in some file somewhere so that Simon would be the boy’s legal guardian. The other man looked far too pleased with himself for Simon’s liking, though he knew he too would struggle not to be cocksure after a well-earned meal. With the Forsaken all but ripped away from him, Peter was getting 8 years worth of emotions and neglect flooding his mind. Senses, both physical and emotional, raw and unused to a world unfiltered by the numbing fog that engulfed Moorland House. 

Simon picked the inconsolable child up, cracking open the window to James’ office and peering out before sitting on the windowsill. 

James didn’t look at them, not with the eyes in his head at least, as Simon prepared to fall out of the window.

“Nice doing business with you Simon, good luck with your little...project”


End file.
